The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Network performance monitoring applications may collect network communications information, process the communications information and display the processed information in various forms, including charts, panels and other displays. Typical monitoring focuses on past and present states of the network and provides characteristics of the network devices based on historical and current performance data.
Conventional monitoring applications trace past and present performance of network devices and communications links, and display various characteristics of the past and present configuration and utilization for the network. While such monitoring may be useful in detecting problems that have already occurred in the network, such monitoring rarely provides enough information for predicting network problems that may occur in the future.